SpyTalk

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (MSN screen grab)

Cascades of shock, astonishment, disdain, intrigue and speculation swirled Wednesday over a blockbuster report that Israel plotted to return former hardline Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power as part of its regime-change plan for Tehran in the first days of the Iran war.

“This is without doubt one of the craziest stories I have ever covered, if not topping the list,” said Ronen Bergman, a member of the New York Times reporting team that broke the story of high level intrigue late Tuesday night, in a note to his followers accompanying his distribution of the piece.

The plan, according to sources who spoke to the Times, was for U.S.-Israeli air strikes to decapitate the regime’s leaders and at the same time kill off guards keeping Ahmadinejad, who’d fallen out of favor with Ayatollah Khamenei and senior leadership, under virtual house arrest. With the former president freed, then, supposedly, Kurds armed by the U.S. would be mobilized to invade Iran and head toward Tehran, where they’d add to the unrest and help topple the government. Ahmadinejad, widely rumored inside Iran to be a secret Israeli asset, an expat expert told SpyTalk, would then take power.

“[T]he Israeli plan foresaw a combination of influence campaigns carried out by Israel and the Kurdish invasion creating political instability in Iran and a sense that the regime was losing control,” reported the Times. “In a third stage, the regime, under intense political pressure and the weight of damage to key infrastructure like electricity, would collapse, allowing for what the Israelis referred to as an ‘alternative government’ to be established.”

The scheme seemed laced with mind-boggling paradoxes and intrigues. The new regime would be headed by Ahmadinejad, whose two terms as president, from 2005 to 2013, were marked by a severe crackdown on political dissent, an expansion of uranium stocks, and inflammatory rhetoric directed at the U.S. and especially Israel, which he would only refer to as a “Zionist regime” that had to be “eliminated.”

Since then, however, his views had dramatically softened, says Hooman Majd, an Iranian-born American journalist, author, and political commentator focused on Iranian affairs, who served as a translator for Ahmadinejad on his trips to the United Nations.

“Over the last few years, he had sort of changed his stance on being anti-Zionist. He even gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper, for example, which is a big no-no for an Iranian politician,” Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran and other books on the regime, told SpyTalk in an interview. “There is not a single Iranian politician who’s ever done that, and certainly no Iranian president would ever do that, former or otherwise”—which prompted questions about his loyalty and eventually led to what amounted to his house arrest and jailing of his political aides.

Suspected Treachery

Rumors swirled that Ahmadinejad was not just disenchanted with the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but had been secretly working for Israel all along, Majd said. The whispered, convoluted reasoning went that his extremist presidency, which had effectively derailed warming relations with the U.S. and Europe under his predecessor Mohammad Khatami, served only to bolster Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign for regime change.

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From Monica Witt to Fatehma Zahra (DoJ)

Witt’s Run: The defection of former Air Force intelligence specialist and OSI agent Monica Witt to Iran was revealed by the Justice Department in 2019, so it’s not clear why the FBI ballyhooed this week that it was offering $200,000 for information leading to her capture (unless it was an attempt to deflect attention from yet another report on the unbecoming behavior of Director Kash Patel.) Witt is believed to have converted to Islam and defected to Iran in 2012-2013. The pattern of her evolution from a Farsi-trained, airborne cryptologist to ideological defector got an interesting treatment from the Warsaw-based law firm Skarbiec, in “The Sergeant Who Became Fatemah Zahra.”

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News of Iran’s strike on Tel Aviv’s Kiriya Defense Ministry complex was suppressed by Israeli censors, but SpyTalk obtained a photo of the damage.

On June 13 of last year, an Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missile with a warhead containing 4,000 pounds of high explosives evaded Israel’s air defenses and scored a direct hit on the headquarters of the IDF’s air force, located in a high rise tower just outside central Tel Aviv’s Kiriya Defense Ministry complex. Jerusalem’s military censors prevented Israeli media from identifying the heavily damaged building, but two trusted sources confirmed it housed the air force headquarters.

Was it a lucky hit, or a harbinger of what was to come? Israel’s much-heralded success in knocking Iranian missiles—and drones—out of the sky during 2025’s 12-day war initially suggested the Kiriya strike may have been a fluke.

But it later emerged that Iranian missiles also had hit five Israeli military bases during that brief war, according to data published this past March by Oregon State University, which tracks bomb damage in war zones via satellites.

Those bases included the sprawling Glilot complex just north of Tel Aviv, which houses the headquarters of nearly all the services making up Israel’s intelligence community. Another was the Tel Nof air force base in the south of the country, where Israel’s squadrons of F-35 warplanes are hangared. The damage inflicted by those strikes, too, went unreported. And only in late March did The New York Times reveal the extent of destruction that Iranian missiles and drones wrought on U.S military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Those Iranian missile strikes should have cautioned President Trump on the ease with which he expected to defeat Iran. It’s not that the information was unavailable to him.

Indeed, in its 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted that Iran “continues to bolster the lethality and precision of its domestically produced missile and UAV systems, and it has the largest stockpiles of these systems in the region.” The threat assessment went on to note that Iran’s missiles and drones “can strike throughout the region.”

Asked if Trump had been briefed on the size and precision of Iran’s missile arsenal before going to war, Norman T. Roule, a former senior CIA officer who served as the national intelligence manager for Iran, said he had no specific information about such briefings. But he added: “U.S. military and civilian intelligence analysts would be expected to monitor closely the size, nature, and capabilities of Iran’s missile arsenal, ensuring that such assessments are immediately available to senior policymakers and warfighters when required for their planning.”

“The Trump administration grossly miscalculated who they were fighting and the enemy’s capabilities across the board,” said Thomas Joscelyn, an expert on Iran and a senior fellow at JustSecurity.org, produced by the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

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Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in Beijing this week (SCMP photo)

President Trump appeared to shrug off an alarming surge in Chinese espionage and cyber assaults on the U.S., suggesting to reporters aboard Air Force One winging home on Thursday that he and Xi Jinping traded slight complaints about the other’s covert operations but didn’t linger on the subject.

Asked whether he raised China’s aggressive cyber infiltrations of U.S. government agencies and infrastructure during their talks, Trump said, “I did. And he talked about attacks that we did in China. Y’know, what they do, we do too.”

“They’re talking about the spying. Well, we do it too,” he said. “We spy like hell on them too.”

“I told him, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about and you’re doing things to us that we probably do know about,’” Trump added.

The president’s casual brushoff of record-setting Chinese espionage threats was a sharp departure from one of his major campaign themes in 2016 and again in 2020, when he repeatedly denounced China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property.

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Nazi troops hoist a war flag over the Acropolis in 1941. (Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-165-0419-19A Photo: Bauer)

Beyond a thirst for global domination, ambitious strongmen share a desperate need to manipulate history to bolster their legitimacy. This obsession with the past is at the heart of Stephan Talty’s compelling new book, The American School of Spies, The Archaeologists Who Fought the Nazis and Saved the Treasures of Ancient Greece.

As the Wehrmacht swept across Europe during World War II, Adolf Hitler obsessed over a fantasy: that his “Aryan” race had its true roots with the gods of ancient Greece. This unfounded belief was the cornerstone of “Germania,” a colossal reimagining of Berlin intended to be the capital of a Thousand-Year Reich, a city of classical-themed statues, arches and monuments—a despot’s plan for a permanent memorial to himself.

When his onslaught across Europe reached Athens in April 1941, Hitler dispatched teams of German archaeologists across the Greek archipelago to search for proof of their Aryan soul. (“Aryan” is an ancient Sanskrit term meaning “noble,” or “civilized,” which became popular among white 19th-century European racial theorists.)

“The Nazi classicists,” writes Talty, “set to work, digging their pickaxes into the Greek soil in order to finally prove that ancient Greece had been founded by Aryan people.”

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Rubio: “We’re not a stupid country.” (White House photo)

Sin City: During a visit to the Vatican this week in an effort to smooth over his boss’s feud with Pope Leo, Secretary of State (and double-hatted National Security Adviser) Marco Rubio took umbrage at a reporter’s question about how President Trump could say the U.S. and Iran are maintaining a ceasefire when they’re shooting at each other. “Only stupid countries don’t shoot back when you’re shot at,” Rubio said. “And we’re not a stupid country.”

Then again, “before the war began the U.S. Intel Community, including CIA, was in agreement that Iran wasn’t developing a nuclear weapon & that Iran would target U.S. bases in the region & shut down the Strait of Hormuz if they were attacked by Israel & the U.S.,” former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent wrote Thursday on X, saying that the reasons Trump went ahead with the war anyway needed to be investigated.

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An AI-generated image shows Putin fearing a drone strike at his May 9 Victory Parade (Image: EAST2WEST via UK Express).

Ever since Vladimir Putin first became president of Russia more than a quarter century ago, biographers and journalists have never failed to take note of his roots as a young KGB agent based in East Germany.

But in recent weeks, amid rum…

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Former CIA officer Jerry Watson is suing the agency to release his book on the agency’s coverup of its catastrophic misjudgments on Iraqi WMD (family photo)

In Part One of our story, reporter Bob Drogin recounted how former CIA officer Jerry Watson came to realize to his horror that “Curveball,” code name for an Iraqi refugee who became a vaunted intelligence source, had entirely fabricated his tale that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons labs—a principal reason cited by top George W. Bush administration officials for the invasion of Iraq. Now, in Part Two, Drogin recounts how Watson’s efforts to get the CIA to come clean were stymied at every turn, ruining his career—and why he’s taken the agency to court to set the record straight.

JERRY WATSON WAS DETERMINED to find the truth about Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, the Iraqi source codenamed Curveball.

He returned to Baghdad in September 2003 and assembled a small team—two analysts, an operations officer and a few security guys. Their first stop was the home of al-Janabi’s boss at the engineering center where he claimed he had worked until 1999.

“He told us that [al-Janabi] quit in the last few days of 1994. He said he didn’t like the low pay and boring work, and walked out and never returned. So they terminated his employment.

“That told us everything Curveball had said about the mobile plants was a total fabrication. No question. No debate. We had been in Baghdad for two days.”

After finding al-Janabi’s address, photo and college transcripts, they knocked on the gate of his family’s home.

“They said, ‘Of course, come on in.’ He had 10 brothers and sisters, I think. Served us tea and baklava. Nicest people in the world.”

One of the sisters told them her brother had worked for Babel Film and Television Production, a local company, after he quit the engineering center. At Babel, one of the senior officials remembered him all too well.

“I asked, ‘Was he a good employee?,’” Watson recalled. “He said, ‘No, he stole some equipment and sold it on the black market and cheated us.’ I started laughing. They said they had filed an arrest warrant against him in criminal court.”

They kept investigating. By late September, they had assembled what Watson called “overwhelming evidence, going back 15 years, that Curveball was a fabricator. And [still] no one would believe it.”

His superiors at WINPAC, the CIA center that focused on foreign weapons threats, “did not like the fact we were digging up contradictory and derogatory intelligence on Curveball, and pushing the intel services involved to accept it,” he said. “They wanted us to slow down and be team players in the Iraqi sandbox.”

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JD Vance and Trump in the White House situation room during the June 2025 strikes on Iran (White House photo)

Inside Strait: U.S. intelligence gave President Trump everything they had on Iran before he went to war on Feb. 28: It wasn’t close to having a nuke, they said, and it didn’t have ICBMs that could hit the U.S. If America attacked, it could well respond with IRBMs and drones at its Gulf neighbors and shut the Strait of Hormuz. The regime also had a multi-layered, decentralized leadership system that could survive a massive decapitation strike, they said. What are they telling him now? “U.S. intelligence agencies are examining how Iran would respond if President Donald Trump unilaterally declared victory in the two-month-old war and moved to pull back from aggressive action against Tehran,” according to Reuters. (No, Vermont Sen. George Aitkin did not advise LBJ to just “declare victory and get out” of Vietnam.)

Secret Service (again): “A week after the shooting, authorities haven’t yet clearly explained what happened that night,” the Wall Street Journal observed on Sunday, recounting the Apr. 25 assassination attempt on President Trump at the White House Correspondents Association dinner.

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UN Security Council, Feb, 5, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell famously held up a small vial, suggesting it contained anthrax, to illustrate the potential threat posed by an Iraqi biological weapons program. CIA Director George Tenet faied to tell him that the agency had never interviewed “Curveball.”

Jerry Watson wasn’t always at war with the CIA.

His home office is lined with accolades and honors from a 31-year CIA career running clandestine operations and producing analysis for policymakers: a DNI national intelligence award, an exceptional service medallion, intelligence commendation medal, exceptional performance awards, even a medal for an injury in Iraq.

Watson served as a CIA operations officer for 21 years, and an analyst for 10. He led two branches at the National Counterterrorism Center, and served in an alphabet soup of other divisions and centers.

His career cratered in the WMD debacle in Iraq, however. He backed CIA misjudgments before the 2003 invasion, but his relentless post-war effort to force a reckoning for the infamous Curveball case—in which the agency swallowed the tale of an Iraqi refugee who claimed Saddam Hussein had mobile biological warfare labs—made him a pariah at Langley. In the end, he was banished to a desk in a storage room among cardboard boxes and file cabinets, and was never promoted again.

“They treated him like shit,” Larry Fox, who spent 33 years at the CIA, mostly as a senior analyst, told me. “I’d never seen that happen before. Never, ever. The problem was, Jerry was very good, and very tenacious. He didn’t give up. And he pissed them off.”

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